Living and Such

I had my arms covered up to my elbows in chicken fry batter, and he worked the fryer. It was steamy and warm, my glasses glazed with a layer of grease and sweat that always seemed to be there no matter how often I cleaned them. We talked over the hissing fryers for the hour that our shifts overlapped. He had been in the South Vietnamese army and had been a prisoner of war after Saigon fell. I believed the good guys had won that war, though I tried never to say it. One day I asked him what it had been like to be a prisoner of war. He didn’t say much. I suggested that at least the North Vietnamese were not like the Khmer Rouge in executing their enemies. He surprised me. He said that killing and dying were easy. He made a trigger with his finger, held it up to an imaginary head, and pulled it. That’s easy, he said. His life as a prisoner—he told me—that had been hard.

He got a second job as a postal worker. He delivered mail along rural routes west of Hillsboro, Oregon. It pleased me so much to picture this small and smiling Vietnamese man, bouncing along dirt roads in his mail truck delivering letters and packages to rural Oregonians. The hour before he started his shift at the store, I would try to get as much done for him as I could. We all did. We all felt the same affection for him.

When his first child was stillborn everyone felt it. His wife was young. They had met in a refugee camp in Thailand. I think he must have been well into his forties but his small frame and his sparkling eyes made him seem much younger. But even this death did not fundamentally change his outlook on life. Eventually, he and his wife had a baby boy. He worked all day and into the evening. He spent the rest of his time with his family. He gave me a hard time for sleeping more than 5 hours a day. He jokingly wondered aloud when I would start working hard, although I already worked 40 hours a week and went to school full time on my two days off.

My work friends took me drinking on my last day as a full-time grocery clerk. I had done that job for six years as I figured out how to be something other than a manual laborer. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I have many pictures of that last day, acting silly in the store and getting very drunk afterwards. In one of my favorite pictures we are standing in a large group and I have my arm around his shoulders, big smiles on both our faces.

When he first started he didn’t speak much English and was unfamiliar with the equipment. It was very difficult to explain to him how to use or clean the machines. I couldn’t see how he was ever going to be able to do customer service. At the end of his first week, my boss asked me what I thought of the new hire. I said that if I were her, I would fire him and find someone else to do the job.

I’ll never forget that.

OneRepublic sings “I owned every second that this world could give/I saw so many places, the things that I did/With every broken bone, I swear I lived.”  I can’t say the same thing. But to be honest, I don’t think anyone has lived that way, including the singer of this song. I would like to say, rather, that I lived life in the best way I could. But even that’s not true. I have done so many things wrong, so many things that I wish I had not done or wish I could have done differently. From my experience, the only thing you get from having lived is the life you lived.

Love and Lies

I cried listening to Etta James and Dr. John sing “I’d Rather Go Blind." It was the middle of the night, and I was watching a dvd from a Time/Life collection called The Midnight Special—I guess I was on theme (the version I was watching is not available online). When James sang, suffered really, the lines “When I looked down in the glass I held to my lips and I saw the reflection of the tears falling down my face that’s when I knew I loved you, couldn’t do without you, and I’d rather be a blind girl,” I lost it. She sang with such emotion, voicing the hopelessness of the feeling, the indignity of that kind of love. That phrase culminated the dialogue between her and Dr. John, in which a lot was communicated between the heaviness in her voice and the gravel in his. But it was more than the emotion, it was also the art. The rising and quieting of the music—moving between the bedroom, the bar, and church—is the foundation of the experience. The performance was at once an intimate conversation, an embarrassing revelation, a renunciation, an example of musical improvisation, an exploration of the relationship between word and sound in music, and an artistic experience of the highest quality. It felt real and true (so does the version I link to above, I think).

Ed Sheeran seems to be going for something similar. The musical sensibility is certainly close: this song aims at the same slow burning, soulful quality. He also wants to bare it all, to hold his heart in his hand for you to see and weep with him. But I’m not feeling it. When he says “Darling, I will be loving you ‘til we’re 70/And, baby, my heart could still fall as hard as 23/And I’m thinking ‘bout how people fall in love in mysterious ways/Maybe just a touch of the hand”; I don’t really believe him. It sounds insincere to me. It sounds like what you say to someone because you know they want to hear it. It sounds more like flattery or bullshit than truth. It means to sound real and vulnerable but it just sounds like a song.

But who is the bigger liar here? Is it the performer who sounds like he is catering to his audience by expressing pretty insincerities? Or is it the performers who sing as if they are feeling the very sentiments they are singing about? Isn’t Ed Sheeran being more honest by performing an untruth, untruthfully? I know these aren’t very penetrating questions. But they do bring up something interesting about art, I hope. Etta James and Dr. John do not love each other. They have never been in a relationship. I’m pretty sure neither of them would choose to be blind over having a broken heart. Everything they portray and sing about in that performance is an untruth. The truth of their performance, that is, what appears so real about it is directly related to their ability to convince us of the artifice. Ed Sheeran seems less truthful than Etta James and Dr. John because, unlike them, he is not a convincing liar.

Nicki and Lily

“There are no letters in the mailbox/And there are no grapes upon the vine/And there are no chocolates in the boxes anymore/And there are no diamonds in the mine.” These lyrics sound portentous and meaningful—loss, emptiness, and so forth—but they also sound completely banal—get another box of chocolate! This is the problem with popular music. It’s sometimes difficult to know how seriously to take it. Entertainment, art, garbage, fantasy, and the ordering of reality, popular music can be all these things at once.

Rae Sremmurd’s “Throw Sum Mo” is difficult for these reasons. On one level, it is a fantasy about money and power given a sexual language. Buying women, emasculating men through money, and the complete indifference to prodigal spending, these things may have some level of reality in the lives of entertainers, but they don’t reflect the realities with which most of us are familiar. So the song serves as wish fulfillment for its audience, pure fancy. But on another level, the fantasy is premised on a misogynistic desire: to control the world through money means also being able to control women, who must dance to the tune of your wealth: “Rainin’ on your body/Won’t you do what I say/Start rubbin’ on your body.” Money is the way to get women to do what you want them to do. The wealth may be a fantasy but the sentiment to want women compliant to men’s wishes is very real.

Nicki Minaj’s chorus complicates that vision. In her voice, the money is not what purchases the women. Instead, it is the fulfillment of their imperative. In other words, women don’t dance because men throw money. Men throw money because women dance.  The petulance in her voice, the way it demands with indifference, captures the agency that she places in the dancing woman. Sure, the situation develops from a misogynistic desire, but women use that desire to empower themselves. That men objectify women is not news to Minaj: “Ass fat, yeah I know.” But she turns this reality into something that women can use for their benefit. Her chorus repeats over and over her command, “throw some mo’.”

The competing understandings of what’s happening in “Throw Sum Mo” bring to mind the tableaux vivants scene in Wharton’s The House of Mirth. About halfway through the novel, Lily Bart, the protagonist, arranges herself to be shown as a painting that reveals her in what she imagines to be her best light. She is the last of tableaux vivants (a form of entertainment in which people dressed up as famous paintings), and the effect of her image on the audience is startling. The audience sees Lily just as she wants them to: all their eyes are focused on her beauty and her body. They are mesmerized by her form. Afterwards, she considers this moment her greatest triumph. And indeed that is the moment when everyone in her society has to admit what an extraordinary beauty she actually is. Yet her triumph is in exactly the terms her society has determined for her. Lily Bart is always thought about in terms of her beauty. She is the object of many men’s desires because she is beautiful and for no other reason, really. Thus she succeeds by objectifying herself but that objectification was all that was ever allowed her. The moment is her greatest triumph and it marks her absolute submission to limits placed on women by her society. Lily has made the men “through some mo’” but only by becoming the dancer.

Women and Country Songs

Losing is a central theme of classic country and western music—losing your love, losing yourself in vice, or just losing at life in general. New country seems much more anxious about what is being lost; hence the nostalgia about how things were that reappears often in the genre. But while the loss seems to be mostly of a personal and experiential nature, it signals a deeper anxiety that while submerged nonetheless comes across quite clearly. Mom’s house, the old town, dad’s ways, agrarian or industrial labor, these are the explicit objects that are mourned in new country, but below them are fears about the loss of stable social categories. What is also being lamented here is the seeming disappearance of a society that makes sense in the eyes of many of the genre’s constituency. If things were coherent and true in the past, then the passing of time is felt as degeneration and as a welter of confusion.

Not everyone feels the same way about the past, of course. Groups that had been violently excluded from participating in society because of their race, sexuality, or gender generally tend to not have a particularly sentimental view of the past. It is impossible to be nostalgic about the past if you associate it with naked oppression. This is why country music appears as reactionary to many people: if you want things to return to the way they were, then you must have a strong investment in how things were. But new country, like all of culture, is not monolithic.

“Somebody’s gotta wear a pretty skirt/Somebody’s gotta be the one to flirt/Somebody’s gotta wanna hold his hand/So God made girls,” sings RaeLynn in an incredibly catchy version of the desire for social order. This song rejects the transformations in gender and sexual relations over the last half century by simply refusing to acknowledge that they happened. Gender roles in this song are clearly defined and comfortably stable. One is tempted to point out the obvious, that men can wear skirts and hold each other’s hands, but that would seem churlish in this context. For alongside the song’s blissful indifference to the changes in gender norms, so too does it not consider possibility of the lack of rigidly determined sexual identities. In the world of the song, boys fuck girls because girls wear skirts and hold their hands. And the certainty of this belief comes from the investment in a transcendental order that creates these roles and confers meaning onto them. God, rather than history, made these relations, insists this song, and therefore they are immutable.

But an equally catchy contemporary country song illustrates the artificiality of the gender norms that “God Made Girls” represents as given. Maddie and Tae sing: “Being the girl in a country song/How in the world did it go so wrong […] We used to get a little respect/Now we’re lucky if we even get/To climb up in your truck, keep our mouth shut, and ride along/And be the girl in a country song.” Country music is depicted by Maddie and Tae as detrimental to women because it depicts them as compliant and subservient to men’s wishes. The complexity of gender and sexual roles are obfuscated by country music, according to Maddie and Tae, in order to reproduce a social order in which women are expected to live up to expectations that belittle them and in which they have no say. Women and their needs are of no concern to the merchants of the figure of “a girl in a country song.” And Maddie and Tae make this critique of country music in a popular and commercially successful country song.

About thirty years ago Teresa de Lauretis proposed that we think of cultural objects as “technologies of gender.” By this she meant that we should think of gender not as something which culture depicts but rather as something which is the product and the process of depiction. We learn our gender by observing its representation and its representation, while not real as such, functions to create our real sense of what our gender is. But as these two country songs illustrate, we are often confronted with representations of gender that don’t quite agree with each other. How do we calm the tremors occasioned by the inconsistencies of culture? The answer to this question must relate to our own moral and political inconsistencies. We don’t change our minds about our political and moral values so much as we don’t have a very firm or consistent grasp on those values. Our political and moral compasses have no true north. Our needle wobbles here and there. Culture produces the technologies of gender, of course, but those technologies can sometimes be as inconsistent and contradictory as the people they turn into men and women.

Fashion and Style

Men popularized the sexy little skirt. A chronicler around 1350 observed that “men, in particular noblemen and their squires, and a few bourgeois and their servants, took to wearing tunics so short and tight that they revealed what modesty bids us to hide.” Even then haters were hating! This shift to immodest, junk-flattering wear marked a significant moment in history. After this, clothing became a matter of constant change in European society. The rhythms have always been slow. Black gowns or lace collars or short colorful breeches remained in vogue for decades at a time. But even these slow shifts were radical when compared to how little clothing had changed in Europe before then or how stable traditional clothes remained outside of Europe. In these contexts, the garments people wore varied very little. Centuries went by without any fundamental alterations to clothing. And still centuries after men started strutting their stuff in revealing skirts, most of the peasantry in Europe continued to wear what they always had. Only aristocrats and the rising bourgeoisie took to wearing new and unusual garments.

These sartorial transformations illustrate something at the core of European society: It was far more willing to turn away from its traditions than other societies and this explains Europe’s later embrace of modernity and the radical transformations that it entailed. We could see the beginning of Europe’s evolving sense of fashion as an indicator of its dynamism or we could also see it as a prelude to the ravenous consumerism that would later define capitalist society. And these two observations are of course related and complementary.

While fashion did indeed change in Europe and that change reflects something about European culture, fashion does not change radically that often. For example, instead of booty skirts, robes, dresses, smocks, frocks, pantaloons, or tunics—garments historically worn by men—men have preferred either trousers or short pants almost exclusively for the last 100 years or so. In fact, when I see men in pedal pushers I feel an involuntary revulsion that speaks volumes about the norms regarding appropriate clothing that society has instilled in me.

We can say then that fashion may be slow to change but style in the modern era is not. Skirts, pants, and shirts may stay more or less the same but patterns, cuts, colors, and materials change season to season, year to year. The dynamism of capitalist society that was revealed in Europe’s move away from traditional clothing in the fourteenth century has been powerfully felt in the last two centuries as the consumerist impulse that the fashion industry creates and satisfies through novelty. Style is the visual language through which subtle changes in clothing are meant to signify truths about who we are and what we believe. And just as we imagine ourselves as ever-changing so too do we want our style to reflect those internal shifts.

A few short years ago, Taylor Swift sang to her imaginary love interest “She wears short skirts/I wear T-shirts” to demonstrate how down to earth she was. Here, Swift presents herself as everywoman, the salt of the earth that gets ignored by the fashionable and the flashy. These days she sings to another imaginary lover “You got that long hair, slicked back, and white T-shirt/and I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt.” How things have changed! In this song, she is no longer the ignored, unwashed masses. Instead, she has become a kind of timeless signifier of fashion. So much so that she associates her love with the image on an unchanging style: “Cause we never go out of style/We never go out of style.” But style is exactly that part of fashion that changes often. We recognize it because things go in and out of style. While it is hard to imagine that short skirts will once again become something that fashionable men wear, it is best for all of us to not place too much stock in the permanence of style.